So how exactly do people fight with scythes?

[Gizensha]

Originally Posted by William

Your most serious problem with this weapon is that you are unready after an attack or parry, because your one-pointed, one-edged weapon is pointed in the wrong direction, and it will take time to maneuver back into position, no matter how light it is.

However, since your reply is already embedded in GURPS rules, ST 17 should prevent that problem.

Originally Posted by William

*blink*

Okay. At this point, how useful any comments will be depends on the amount of fidelity to tactical physics you really care about. Rule of Cool counts for a lot. But one of the most common critiques aimed at erstwhile fantasy artists is a tendency to put about three times as many blades on a bladed weapon as could in any way be practical.

Although by the time you get to 10x you've crossed that line twice and are no longer beyond cool and into stupid but now beyond stupid and back into cool thanks to sheer audacity. Unless you managed to get lost and wound up in insanely stupid by accident.

Lampshade hanging helps too.

(c.f. - Swordchucks. For both.)

[Xhosant]

Tip-of-the-hat to the insane logic. I respect these things.
As for the previous comment, it IS mostly an one-hit-kill-deal, plus some failure recovery which i'm working on.

[jason taylor]

A pertinent question is "why didn't it become popular?" Axes did, Kukris did, several other non-military implements became popular for war. One must presume that they just didn't catch on and the assumption that our ancestors didn't think them terribly efficient for removing our other ancestors is as good an explanation as any. However under that assumption the answer to the original question is "they didn't". That is there wouldn't have been a martial arts for scythes because anyone who stayed in the field long enough to learn any skill would have acquired a more conventional weapon by then.

[DanHoward]

It didn't become popular because it was pretty useless in battle. Scythes are ridiculously slow and unbalanced. Anyone who weaponised the thing first removed the blade, rotated it 90 degrees, and put it back on so it was straight. 90 degree blades are very hard to control, they have a tendency to rotate in the hands. The handles help prevent this but then you can't slide your hands up and down the haft.

[David Johansen]

Funny thing, I've got a scythe in my shed. Used it to clear an acre a few times, cut down my grandpa's corn in the fall, cleared weeds out of my alley last year now that I'm back in the city.

Really it's a trick to use it without cutting yourself and if you want it to work right you keep it really sharp. I cut myself good just putting the blade guard on one time.

Even so, I imagine a particularly dedicated mad man could figure out techniques for it. Most of the would involve handing it to the enemy and daring them to hit you with it.

[Iloverwby2013]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SoeNwEjpTE4
Here is a video of 2 guys demonstrating how to wield a scythe in combat

[Luke Bunyip]

The perfect weapon for seedling triffids.
(Apologies if this has been previously mentioned upthread)

[Black Leviathan]

I'm amused that we spend so much energy being dubious of how a tool that was responsible for so many accidental deaths that it became part of the mantle of Death in western culture could be used as a weapon, however we're all so perfectly willing to accept that anyone ever successfully harmed someone with a Yo-yo or an executioner's basket.

[Dalillama]

The metaphor of the grim reaper originally involved a quite large skeleton, of sufficient size that humans were at the same scale relative to his scythe as wheatis to ours. It's nothing to do with the direct lethality of scythes. Which I'm pretty sure was already covered in this thread. Also, I challenge you to find anyone on these boards suggesting that a yo-yo is a serious weapon, and I have no clue what you might mean by executioner's basket.

[Irish Wolf]

Well, the supposed history of the yo-yo as a weapon of war was definitely a marketing ploy back in the day - but on the other paw, I can also see how it could be used as a weapon, provided your opponent wasn't thinking along those lines already (it would be trivially easy to defeat such an attack, after all...).